Social media site X went offline yesterday, and now billionaire owner Elon Musk has blamed the ‘massive cyber attack’ on Ukraine.
‘We get attacked every day’, Musk said in a post on the platform yesterday. ‘But this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …’
During an interview with Fox News’ Larry Kudlow, Musk later claimed: ‘There was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.’
A cybersecurity expert has warned it’s ‘dangerous’ to point the finger at Ukraine. Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at software security firm Eset, told PA he is ‘confident’ it was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which involves multiple IP addresses flooding a server or website with internet traffic.
Mr Moore added that ‘simple analysis’ of the IP addresses would point towards their location, but that this can be ‘tampered with’ to make it seem that the origin is in a different country.
He said: ‘Without seeing the report of the investigation it would be difficult to agree with this accusation either way.’
But cyber attacks are notoriously hard to trace back to their authors and the IP addresses behind them rarely provide any meaningful insight into who was behind them, with many hackers using VPNs.
Tracker website Down Detector noted a spike in reported problems at around 9 am yesterday morning, with issues flagged by thousands of users.
Hacking group ‘Dark Storm’ later claimed responsibility for the outage, but Musk hasn’t confirmed it.
Dr Sina Pournouri, a lecturer in cyber security at Sheffield Hallam University told Metro: ‘Large platforms like X are always prime targets for cyberattacks.
‘However, in the case of today’s outage, the exact cause remains unknown. It could be something as minor as human error or as severe as a large-scale cyberattack, such as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
‘Human error, particularly during routine updates, is a common cause of system crashes.
‘A simple misconfiguration such as an incorrect setting in a firewall, load balancer, or server can disrupt connectivity or render services unavailable.
‘Regardless of who owns or manages these platforms, such incidents are always a possibility.’
Metro has approached X for comment.
Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, for £ 34.5 billion in 2022.
He has been at the centre of some controversy as head of the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The department, tasked with slashing federal spending, has drawn close to two dozen lawsuits after DOGE officials gained access to a sensitive database.
Thousands of federal jobs have been cut, contracts cancelled and some sections of the government, such as the US Agency for International Development, shut down.
The Trump administration and Musk argue it was given a mandate to restructure the US government, however.
Since he was appointed to the role, protesters in the US have targeted Tesla stores across the country.
Superchargers at a shopping centre in Massachusetts were set on fire earlier this month and ‘no Musk’ was painted onto a building. A man also fired a gun at a Tesla store in Oregon in February. Musk owns around 13% of Tesla.
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